Take That Colston and the Statue of Limitations

The present hysteria stated out a few years ago with demands for apologies. The great British People had to apologise to the Irish Nation for the famine. Finally the oleogenous Blair in 1997 performed a near, we regret type apology. Did Obama apologise to the Native Americans? The Indian Law centre tells me that he did:

The version signed by Obama became watered down, not making a direct apology from the government, but rather apologizing "on behalf of the people of the United States to all Native peoples for the many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted on Native peoples by citizens of the United States."

The resolution also includes a disclaimer: Nothing in it authorizes or supports any legal claims against the United States, and the resolution does not settle any claims.

'This does not affect your statutory rights' was omitted.

It's all nonsense. Apology as a moral event must involve the doer of the crime and not some far off, long dead, relation or a statue.

Vilfredo Pareto was fond of bizarre stories drawn from classical sources which served to illustrate his theories about residues and derivatives. Re derivatives which he calls juridical entities he cites:

Pausanias, Pcriegesis, VI, Elis II, n, 5-7, relates that, at Thasos, one of the rivals of the champion runner, Theagenes, was in the habit of thrashing his statue every night, and that finally to punish the man it fell upon him and crushed him : "The children of the dead man then brought action against the statue for murder, and following one of the Draconian laws, the Thasians threw it into the sea." But a blight oracle declared that it was because the Thasians "had forgotten the greatest of their fellow-citizens." So they fished up the statue and re-erected it in its original position.

Take that Colston, Gandhi, Jefferson etc. I suppose if you can designate a business corporation a person anything is possible

Alexandrine History

This extreme is illustrated by the impressions that Jean Reville describes,in connexion with the problem of the Fourth Gospel :"Concluding his study of the Prologue of the Fourth Gos-pel, M.Loisy says of the Evangelist: 'He is not writing a history of Jesus but rather a treatise on knowledge of Jesus.' I hold instead that he intended to write a history, but history as an Alexandrian understood history , which is something radically different from what we mean by history....The aim of the Gospel, the aim of the Prologue itself, is historical, that is the fact that must not be lost sight of. However, the Evangelist writes history as all men who were imbued with the Alexandrine spirit in his day wrote history, with a sovereign contempt for concrete material reality, as was the case with Philo or St. Paul. In the view of those great minds, history was not a pragmatic narrative of events, a faithful reproduction of details, a careful chronology, an integral resurrection of the past. The historian's task was to emphasize the moral and spiritual values of facts, their deeper significance, that element of eternal truth which is present in each contingent and ephemeral phenomenon in history.

(from Le quatrieme Evangile by Jean Reville as quoted in The Mind and Society by Vilfredo Pareto)

Pareto's Cormanesque Juridical Entities

Pareto was fond of bizarre stories drawn from classical sources which served to illustrate his theories about residues and derivatives. Re a derivative which he calls juridical entities he cites:

Pausanias, Pcriegesis, VI, Elis II, n, 5-7, relates that, at Thasos, one of the rivals of the champion runner, Theagenes, was in the habit of thrashing his statue every night, and that finally to punish the man it fell upon him and crushed him : "The children of the dead man then brought action against the statue for murder, and following one of the Draconian laws, the Thasians threw it into the sea." But a blight oracle declared that it was because the Thasians "had forgotten the greatest of their fellow-citizens." So they fished up the statue and reerected it in its original position.

Pope Formosus was put on trial in 897. Unfortuneately at that point in time he had been dead for eight months:

The Cardinals, the Bishops, and many other Church dignitaries, assembled in Sanhedrin. The Pope's body, wrested from the tomb in which it had been lying for eight months, was clothed in the pontifical robes and seated on a throne in the Council hall. Pope Stephen's attorney arose and turned towards the horrible mummy at its side sat a terrified deacon who had been designated to act as its counsel. [Animals too had their attorneys.] The prosecutor read the charges. Then the living Pope inveighed at the dead Pope in a mad violence: 'Why, ambitious man, didst thou usurp the Apostolic See of Rome, thou who wert Bishop of Porto?' The attorney of Formosus answered in his defence so far as terror did not paralyze
his tongue. The dead Pope was convicted and his punishment fixed.

Pareto contra Bentham

"The sophistry,'" he says, "supplies a legitimate presumption against those who use it. Only for lack of sound arguments does one resort to it. [That is based on the implicit assumption that logically sound arguments are more convincing than fallacies. Experience is far from showing that.] As regards measures that are in themselves sound it is useless, or at least it cannot be indispensable. [The same implicit assumption, and experience, again, in no sense concords with it.] The sophistry presupposes he is in those who use it, or in those who adopt it, either lack of sincerity or lack of intelligence." Bentham's assumption is that the person who uses a fallacy recognizes it as such (insincerity) or that, if he fails so to recognize it, wanting in intelligenceAs a matter of fact many fallacies that are current in a given society are repeated in all sincerity by people who are exceedingly intelligent and are merely voicing in that way sentiments which they consider beneficial to society. Also implicit in Bentham's sermon is the assumption that lack of sincerity and lack of intelligence are uniformly harmful to society; whereas there are plenty of cases to go no farther than diplomacy where too much sincerity may be harmful, and other cases where a highly intelligent man may go wrong and do incalculable harm to a society by forcing certain logical policies upon it; whereas a stupid individual instinctively following beaten paths that have been counselled by long experience may be a blessing to his country.

Pareto is deprecating the assumed persuasiveness of the logical. On the contrary people are more influenced by sentiments and select the enthymeme of their choice to serve as justification for their beliefs and actions.(Vol.3: Mind and Society)

Pareto upgrades

Pareto: You are pleased to mock my devotion to the Angora cat.

Om: No Dottore, I am following your indication of the error in looking at data through fanciful anthropological theory. From a 1000 year perspective I could hold that the cat is your totem, your spirit animal. You have an affinity for the animal that is substitutive, participative and therefore more than symbolic. Being the cat allows its powers to be manifest in you. Independent yet responsive but not immediately so, a cat seems to consider – do I care enough? Now of course all of that animal is sacred and its products are talismanic, like the milk of the sacred cow is so pure and powerful that its products may be shared by all without pollution. The jumper knit from the sacred cat yarn deflects, protects, enhances and is warm and lightweight.

Pareto: Unfortunately the vibrations from the Society for the Suppression of Vice have a moth-like power which diminishes the efficacy of the garment. A distressing fact, but what to do?

Om: So we must upgrade to a new derivation in line with present scientific knowledge. May I recommend a vial of heavy water?

Pareto: Only if blessed by Einstein.

Pareto's Retrovision and Prevision

In general the unknown has to be explained by the known and the past is therefore better explained by the present than the present by the past though the latter method was followed by the majority of writers in the beginning of sociology and is still followed by many. (para. 548)

From that it follows that before a theory can be considered true , it is virtually indispensable that there be perfect freedom to impugn it. Any limitation, even indirect and however remote ,imposed on anyone choosing to contradict it is enough to cast suspicion upon it. (para. 568)
(from The Mind and Society)

Does that latter paragraph stand out because of our present enthusiasm for falsifiability?

Para-Optimal Pareto

Pareto is better than optimal. Such is the judgement of 20% of the people 80% of the time. Is that it? No, probably not but enough if you are an Ancient Mariner and have buttonholed a wedding guest. Once it was said to me to shut me up - ‘you have a theory about everything’. Though knowing its purport I took it as a compliment. Chidden by Pareto I would have bowed my head and confessed the egregious need to offer an explanation for everything as a fool’s improvisation. I ought to have admitted - ‘come back to me in twenty years, I don’t have enough data at present’.

I’m more than half way through Book 1 of The Mind and Society and it’s an excellent read. Real scholarship or the transmutation of vast erudition into a personal comprehension is a rare thing. Footnotes banished to unread (you too?) Endnotes would be a serious loss. He does not stint them. Is he wrong about Natural Law and Right Reason? I struggle to defer judgement and await his explication of those mysterious ‘residues’. How would you find them and having found them build a theory that is not itself a transcendental hypothesis? Reply:

- I have the data.